


tell me your secrets (tell me your fears)

by hyungsobbing



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Disability, Fluff, Gen, M/M, OT7, angst? idk if this counts as that, i see...thE VISION!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 01:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17540276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyungsobbing/pseuds/hyungsobbing
Summary: to have your sight stolen away from you is an awful thing for child to experience, but hell if chenle's going to let that ruin his shot at life. he just...needs a little time.





	tell me your secrets (tell me your fears)

**Author's Note:**

> fic title + some chapter titles taken from by sundial!

For as long as he’d known, Chenle had been blind. His mother, the doctors, and even his brother had tried to sugarcoat it. 

“Your son’s vision has been impaired, Mrs Zhong. Maybe in the future, when his body is more mature and stable, he’ll be able to undergo surgery, a vitrectomy, to regain his sight.”

He’d turned to his mother, a presence by his bedside, his unseeing eyes wide and empty. “I can’t see anything, Mom.” He’d said, hand grasping his mother’s finger loosely. “Oh, sweetie,” His mother choked out, and his brother made an odd noise that sounded vaguely like a sob. But that couldn’t be possible, because Sicheng was brave and calm and never cried. and Chenle tilted his head. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re—you may not be able to see things clearly, but we’ll help you. Don’t be afraid.” His mother had soothed him, but there’d been layer of despair and anguish thinly hidden beneath her comforting words. Chenle frowns, not understanding. He wasn’t scared. He was confused, yes, but afraid wasn’t the right word to describe his situation.

After a while of sitting in silence, his mother had stood up, the screeching of her chair almost painfully loud. She’d patted his hand stiffly, saying that she and his brother had to go talk to the doctors. Chenle was left in the room, alone—but not really. The sounds of people talking filtered into the room, slightly distorted and beyond his comprehension in his drowsy state. Nurses entered and exited the room, carrying with them trays of food and diluted painkillers, but everything felt and tasted bland to him.

“How are you feeling, darling? Do your eyes hurt? They don’t? That’s good, then. Don’t worry about not being able to see very well, you’ll be okay!” 

But he knew. He’d known that he was blind, that the possibility of him miraculously regaining his vision was close to none. There was no sugarcoating the truth, and Chenle knew that from the vast darkness surrounding him, suffocating him.

 

At seven years old, Chenle had been involved in a freak accident. He had been in a clothing boutique, sitting and waiting patiently for his mother who’d been in the toilet. A driver had lost control of the wheel and his freight truck had swerved off the road, ramming straight through multiple shop and shattering anything in its path. The driver had died from the impact almost instantly, and the other four people in the shop were driven straight to the intensive care unit, and three of them died in that night itself. The last one survived, and stayed in the hospital for the next two months, under constant observation and scrutiny.

The traumatic brain injury caused by the force of the truck resulted in a sudden build-up of pressure within the skull, which severely damaged his optic nerve. The surgery had saved his life, preventing him from entering a permanent vegetative state, but the damage was done. 

At seven years old, Zhong Chenle had been declared legally blind.

-

“Stop fussing, gē! You already dropped me off outside school, there’s nothing else you can do unless you walk me right to my classroom.” Chenle rolls his eyes. His irises had originally been black, and after the accident they remained so, albeit a little clouded over. It made it hard for people to realise he was blind right off the bat. 

He was expected to be fully blind, unable to see anything at all, but after a couple of months, he was able to see beyond the phosphenes floating in the darkness. He could see the vague silhouettes of things and people moving around, and after a while more he could discern the general colours of objects and the scenery. He’d almost forgotten what the colour blue looked like, but now, when he looked upwards, he could see the slight tint of cyan in his vision.

Sicheng frowns. “I’m not fussing! That’s Mom’s job. I’m just a little worried. Moving a whole continent away from home is really hard.” 

“Shouldn’t that be harder for you, then? I know you only had one friend back in China, so I can only wonder how difficult Seoul University must be for you now.” Chenle teases his brother, then yelps as Sicheng pinches his cheeks a little too hard. “Don’t be a brat. Go in before you’re late.” 

Chenle nods eagerly, reaching up clumsily to wrap two arms around his brother’s neck, and Sicheng sighs and returns the hug, smoothing a hand over Chenle’s hair. “I’ll see you at home,” He says, voice muffled by Sicheng’s shoulder.

He separates from his brother, setting off in the direction he presumed the high school was. “Wrong way!” Sicheng calls out, and Chenle flushes and changes direction.

There’s no one to guide him to class since attendance-taking has already started, and he fumbles his way up the stairs, hands gripping the railings and praying he doesn’t fall over. That would definitely make for a terrible first impression. He enters the wrong class twice and ends up in the bathroom thrice, but eventually manages to make it to his homeroom class.

Twisting the door handle, he shuffles inside, a hand braced on the wall for support. “Are you Zhong Chenle?” The teacher asks and Chenle nods, nerves twisting in his stomach. “We’ve already introduced ourselves, so would you mind standing up here to just tell the class a little about yourselves!” 

Chenle makes his way over to the voice, and when he gets a little closer he realises the teacher is wearing a bright yellow tie, bright enough to be visible even to him, and he snickers mentally, the knots in his stomach loosening a little. “Hi! I’m Zhong Chenle, I’m Chinese. And, uh, I’m blind,” He smiles sheepishly. In that moment, he’s the tiniest bit glad that he can’t see his classmate’s reactions, because he wasn’t sure if his classmates in Korea would be as accepting of his…disability as his friends back in China were.

Still, he’s trained his other senses to be sharper, more alert, to make up for his perpetual blindness. He can hear a few of them gasping in surprise, and shocked murmuring, but there’s no jeering or rotten eggs thrown at him. Those television dramas must have been lying to him, then.

They clap politely, and the teacher directs him to a seat near the window. He’s arranging his stationery and books on the table when something hits him in the back of his head, and he startles. (An eraser?) “So, it’s true, then? You’re really blind?” A voice says. Curious, not insulting. He could deal with curiosity.

Chenle turns around in his seat. “Yeah! I can see vague shapes and colours but they mostly look like blobs to me, I guess.” The boy behind him laughs good-naturedly, and Chenle relaxes, some of the tension seeping out of him. “That’s cool.” The boy says, and Chenle can imagine him shrugging. He introduces himself as Jaemin, and he’s planning to audition for their school’s dance club. Jaemin asks what club Chenle wants to join, and Chenle stutters. “I—I can’t really—” 

And he’s saved by the teacher scolding them for talking during class. He faces the front again, relieved. It’s not that Chenle doesn’t want to participate in any club activities, but the topic of his interests and hobbies had become a bit of a sore spot for him.

•

For some time after the accident, he had become unresponsive. Even when he was discharged from the hospital ward, he would sit at the balcony for hours, head tilted towards the sky. He could feel the stifling heat of the sun and the gentle brush of the wind on his skin, and at times the splatter of raindrops, but could never see anything beyond the emptiness in his vision.

Sometimes, Sicheng would sit next to him, the telltale scrape of the rocking chair giving away his entrance. “What are you thinking about, squirt?” He asks, one hand on Chenle’s hand, reassuring the younger of his presence.

“Hm. Nothing much, really.” Chenle hums, turning towards Sicheng. “But, gē?”

“Yeah?”

“What colour is the sky right now? Is it blue?” The word blue sounded foreign in his mouth, because he no longer knew what the word meant. 

Sicheng doesn’t reply for a while, letting out a sigh which would have been imperceptible if not for Chenle’s keen hearing. “It’s…not really blue. It’s about to rain, and the clouds are really heavy, so the sky is kind of a greyish dark blue.”

Chenle laughs, a soft sound that didn’t hold any amusement. 

Oh, Chenle. Sicheng thinks. The accident had been so pitifully unfair, stealing away the vision from an optimistic and cheerful child, turning him into a ghost of his previous self. It wasn’t so much of his lack of vision itself, but rather, the opportunities cruelly stolen from him, and his childlike happiness and naivety gone before Chenle could even have the chance to experience an ordinary childhood.

Sicheng had been angry. Angry at the (now deceased) driver, at life for dealing his little brother a bad hand, and at himself for not knowing how to make it better. He’d resolved to do whatever he could to help Chenle, and he would stick by that promise.

“What do you think about picking up a hobby?” Sicheng weighs out his words carefully, glancing at his brother, afraid that one wrong word or expression could tip the balance and cause Chenle to disappear within himself, beyond salvation or help.

“Like what?” Chenle asks. “Like…didn’t you take a few piano lessons before? You could try picking it up again.” Sicheng suggests.

Chenle leans back in the chair, fingers tapping the armrest. “But how? I wouldn’t be able to see the piano keys.” Sicheng didn’t have an answer to that. He didn’t seem have answers to a lot of things recently, and he hated it. He turns to his side, resting his cheek against the cotton fabric of the rocking chair, settling his gaze on his younger brother.

He doesn’t expect Chenle to smile wryly. He looked almost…jaded. Which was odd, for an eight-year-old, especially one that used to be so easily delighted, like when small animals turn up on their front yard, sniffing around. Or when he brings back an art piece (medium: crayon) with squiggles of Sicheng and himself holding hands, screaming happily about his day.

Now, Chenle couldn’t even see any of those.

“I think…I’ll think about that, gē. But for now, I don’t really feel like doing anything, you know?” Chenle’s voice comes out barely a whisper, and Sicheng’s heart clenches painfully in his chest. His younger brother shouldn’t have been forced to grow up so fast. It wasn’t fair.

•

Thankfully, all of the teachers try to slow down their pace for him, verbally explaining the concepts in detail rather than relying on the whiteboard. Thankfully, he’s always been more of an audio learner, which makes tests way easier. When they had to move to Korea because of his mother’s job and Sicheng’s university, his mother sent him to this school in particular was because of the school’s guidelines for ‘handicapped’ people. They would allow him to take tests orally and have Braille printed on certain surfaces for him to make his way around school easily. 

Lunch break rolls around quickly, and a flicker of doubt enters his mind. Would he be able to make friends, or would he have to spend the rest of his high school like a loner? His Korean wasn’t all that good, and he was blind. Who’d want to make friends with a foreigner with a weird accent and a handicap, anyway? God, he’d expected too much out of this school, and it’d be a wonder if he could make it through school without dropping out or—

“Chenle!” Jaemin pats the top of his head, and he jumps a little. “Do you want to come down for lunch with me?” 

What? 

“What?” Chenle squints. Jaemin laughs good-naturedly, and repeats, “Do you want to have lunch together? I know I may not be the best of company, but I have another friend which you may want to meet! And I—”

“No, it’s not that! You…want to be friends…with me?” For a moment, Jaemin doesn’t respond, and Chenle’s worries that he’d botched up his grammar somewhere along the line, or Jaemin had taken personal offence to that and decided that he wasn’t worth it. “Why not? You’re cute!” 

Now that was something he could believe. Although he didn’t actually know what he looked like exactly, his brother and his friends always assured him that he was way above average in terms of looks. But someone akin to a stranger being this familiar with him? Chenle wasn’t entirely sure how to respond without seeming like a jerk. “You’re not bad yourself either! I mean, you have a nice voice, and people with nice voices usually have nice faces, so I would assume so?” Chenle stands up, and he feels a pair of hands squeezing his cheeks.

“You’re too cute! To answer your question, yes, I like to think I’m quite good-looking too.” Jaemin jokes back, and Chenle feels the weight on his chest lighten a little. “So, will you come with me? There’s a few people from my middle school that would love to meet you!” The taller (presumably, since Chenle’s below average height for his age) boy tugs on Chenle’s hand lightly.

“Yeah, that sounds really great.” Chenle says, a spark of hope lighting up in his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> also, i know i said chenle became blind cause of his non-functioning(ish) optic nerve so like he may not be able see phosphenes bc those are caused by ur retinas doing some bio shit and i mean the optic nerve is what sends impulses to ur brain blah blah but yeah artistic license!!!! and for the sake of this i aged some characters down abit…so  
> jisung, chenle, jaemin - 15  
> jeno, renjun, hyuck - 16  
> mark, yukhei-17
> 
> honestly this has been in drafts since november 2018 and i didnt touch it for the whole of dec cause i hated it. still kinda do ngl cause this is prob my first time tryna do sth that isnt...crack?


End file.
